ALIRE: Ada LIbrary REpository

A catalog of ready-to-use Ada/SPARK libraries plus a command-line tool (alr) to obtain, build, and incorporate them into your own projects. It aims to fulfill a similar role to Rust’s cargo or OCaml’s opam.

Design principles

alr is tailored to userspace, in a similar way to Python’s virtualenv. A project or workspace will contain all its dependencies.

Some projects require binary packages from the distribution (Debian/Ubuntu’s apt, msys2’s pacman on Windows). In this case the user will be asked to authorize an installation through the distribution package manager.

Properties and dependencies of projects are managed through a TOML file. This file exists locally for working copies of projects, and the Alire community index stores the files corresponding to its projects.

The complete build environment is automatically set up by Alire, thus freeing the user from concerns about installation paths. The user simply adds dependencies to the alire.toml manifest, either from the command-line (alr with) or a text editor, Alire handles the rest.

Supported platforms

Alire builds are available for Linux x86-64, Windows x86-64 and macOS x86-64. For all those platforms, recent Ada compiler (GNAT FSF) are provided including cross compilers for ARM, RISC-V and AVR.

For other platforms, Alire can be built from sources using a GNAT FSF compiler version 9.2 onward.

Tue Mar 19 00:20:11 UTC 2024